The short-term mission trip — the one- or two-week summer experience that for thirty years was the backbone of evangelical missions volunteering — has not recovered from the pandemic. The numbers tell the story. In 2018, roughly 1.6 million short-term mission participants were sent from American churches. In 2025, that number was approximately 480,000. A 70 percent decline.
What replaced the model is, depending on whom you ask, either a long-overdue correction or a disaster. The honest assessment is closer to the first.
Three things changed simultaneously.
First, the cost. Travel costs rose sharply between 2021 and 2023 and have not come down. A short-term trip that cost $1,800 per participant in 2019 now costs $2,800–3,400. Churches that previously sent thirty people now send eight. The funds that used to support a thirty-person trip are now, in many congregations, redirected into longer-term partnership work.
Second, the partnership ethic. A generation of mission scholarship — most notably Toxic Charity (Lupton, 2011) and When Helping Hurts (Corbett & Fikkert, 2009) — had been making the case for over a decade that short-term trips, well-meaning as they were, often disrupted local economies, created dependencies, and exhausted the host pastors who had to absorb wave after wave of visitors. The pandemic provided an unintended pause that allowed many congregations to re-evaluate.
Third, the rise of long-term lay partnerships. A new model has emerged in which a sending church partners with a single host church or ministry for ten or more years, sends a small number of trained lay people on six-month to two-year assignments, and underwrites the local ministry’s existing programming rather than designing its own. This is the model that has grown the most.
The result is a global missions landscape that is, in raw participant numbers, dramatically smaller — but in dollars deployed, broadly steady. The dollars are simply going to fewer people, who stay longer, and who in many cases work under the supervision of local pastors rather than American team leaders.
Host pastors interviewed for this article — drawn from Honduras, Uganda, Cambodia, and Ukraine — were almost unanimously positive about the shift. The pace is more humane. The local relationships are deeper. The accountability runs in both directions.
The questions that remain are about formation. Short-term trips were the entry point for a generation of young American Christians into the global church. They were also the moment a great many young people made career-defining decisions about full-time mission, ministry, or vocational work. The current model, with its smaller and longer-tenure participant pool, does not produce the same volume of formation experiences. The denominations and parachurch agencies that used to staff their pipelines from short-term-trip alumni are now reckoning with a smaller pipeline.
The pipeline question is the open one. The partnership-quality question is, by every available account, already answered.